The smart assistant competition between Apple, Amazon, and Google is growing every day. Until now, Siri has been focused on end-users, but a new acquihire by Apple is pointing to Siri moving in a different direction.

TechCrunch reports that the small, 6 person startup that Apple has acquihired is Init.ai. The company was known for its customer service automation.

…a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions…

The report notes that there was no intellectual property included in the deal, but was instead about bringing the Init.ai team to Apple to work on Siri.

Business Chat appears to be Apple’s way of competing with Facebook and Twitter in making it easy for customers to communicate with brands. Both of those social networks have put a strong focus on such capabilities, but Apple hopes that its strong integration into Siri, Spotlight, Safari, and Maps will help it attract users.

By coincidence, Brisson wrote an essay a year ago about how Apple was putting itself into a complicated situation versus competitors like Amazon, Google and Facebook by not opening Siri more than it has to date. He also acknowledged that because Apple follows a different philosophy and business model as a company, squaring that circle could prove to be one of its biggest challenges.